E-Marketing Tips: Five Tips to Engage the Unengaged

Five Tips to Engage the Unengaged
Dominic Powers, Senior Vice President, Asia Pacific, Epsilon International

E-Marketing Tips


Keywords :	email reactivation, inactives, email segmentation	Date :	12-19-2008

Newsletter > Asia Pacific > 2008 > Dec > E-Marketing Tips

Once a consumer has signed up to receive product promotions and news via email, many marketers assume that the customer wants to hear from them indefinitely and very rarely pay an attention to how that relationship could change over time, as consumers move to the different stages of the customer and purchase lifecycles. What was once relevant to the consumer's needs carries no value and they quickly become disinterested. These consumers are easy to spot if you know what you are looking for - look closely at your recent campaign history and see how many of your customers have seemingly ignored all your well crafted offers and messages and have not even opened them let alone clicked or purchased.

As the latest Epsilon research shows 20-50% of the consumers on most house lists haven't opened or clicked an email for 12 months or longer. And many marketers have a large volume of consumers who have not interacted with their brand in an email for the past 6 months. These are the unengaged; and while left in your regular contact streams can have a negative impact on your ROI, they can also be a strong source of revenue if you segment them and work on appropriate treatments.

Here are 5 top tips that can help you re-engage the unengaged.


1.	Don't mail the dead: Literally and metaphorically! Remove any record from your database that has not interacted in any way over the past 12 months. If you are feeling very confident make it 6 months.

2.	Degrees of engagement. Start by segmenting your list by customer engagement metrics across all your email touch points. A simple segmentation can be on "time since last open" and "time since last click"; either do this in weeks or months. From here, you can start developing different treatments too.

3.	Be brave and give the consumer the chance to unsubscribe. Add a simple text message on the top of all regular email communications to your various unengaged segments for a month or two, asking them to reconfirm their subscription or unsubscribe. If your business also has regular offline communications with your customers, insert a personal details update flyer or message into the pack. Look at the "Click to Open Ratio": If you have a low click to open ratio it could be that your offers are not relevant or strong enough. Look at testing a small cell with a strong offer tied to content that drove the consumers to sign up in the first place. If this works you know that you have broken the promise of relevancy that the relationship was built upon. Go back and rebuild that trust by looking at your content strategy.

4.	Communicate value and benefits regularly. Put the benefits reminder in the welcome message, every customer service email, e-newsletter and on your website. Password reminder messages and any subscription renewal notifications are ideal locations to list out what email services or communications they have subscribed to and the value they can bring.

5.	Test and repeat from step 1 again!

E-Marketing Tips

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